Spam emails are so annoying. They seem to get worse and worse, despite doing all you can to stop them. Are you frustrated by this and the time it wastes every day? Well I think I have found a range of solutions to coping with junk emails and removing them from your email host before they can harm your computer.
So what can you do?
When you first start using a new email address life is rosy as you only get messages from genuine contacts. However this does not last very long as disclosing your email is virtually unavoidable. Why does this occur. While your trust your friends emails are used for all sorts of verification so it is only a matter of time before your email address ends up in the hands of a spammer. Perhaps you need to post your email address on a website. You should always use a contact form rather than an email address but many users will be put off by this. Likewise to register a software application or a URL you must provide a valid email and often a hotmail or even a Gmail address will not be acceptable. So inevitably, over time your email address will become known and the spammers will address to their list.
If you register a domain name, you are legally required to give a valid contact email address. These records must legally be made available publicly. A spammer can search the Whois records and collect your address and many others. You may want to use a secondary address for this.
Spammers will particularly target forums, Usenet groups and chat rooms in their search for email addresses. So you should never use a your PRIMARY email address when you register as a user for these type of services
Create several anonymous accounts at somewhere like hotmail.com or Yahoo, specifically for this purpose. You may also want to set up a gmail account for similar purposes. This will keep your major email account free of spam and you can clean out the junk from your other accounts periodically.
There are several websites which allow you to use a fake email address to avoid using your primary email address. If you have registered a domain you can often have a virtually unlimited source of email address, but you may need change the names with you host device. Such a provider is Trashmail. Generally you only use these "fake email address" once.
Spammers should be mercilessly blocked as well as anyone who sends you emails you don't want. You need to be very vigilant to keep blocking them. You can also unsubscribe from many services, but this does not always work and it may be very dangerous to contact them because it shows that the email address is live and the link may contain a virus.
Spam filters are software devices that intervenes between your email provider application and your remote mail server. They access all the mail from your ISP mail account, applies a filters to it and then passes the good stuff onto your email account service. The spam is automatically blocked and transferred into a Junk email area. You can still review it, restore it or delete it. Make sure the tool blocks at 95% of your spam.
If you report a spammer the rogue could lose their account. But this is a never ending battle. Spammers will quickly open new sites. Spamming is not necessary illegal it depends on the country and what the spammer does. There are many sites for reporting spam.
Unfortunately, once your email address is known to the spammers the junk mail will continue unabated, and there is not much you can do. There is no point trying to tell them to stop or complaining as this is counter-productive and can to tell the spammer that they have found an active address, which makes it more valuable and they will onsell it to other spammers. The only solution is to cope with it or start a new private email.
There are some excellent software applications that allow you to view all your emails on their servers without downloading them to your email provider application. The software I use for this is called Mailwasher Pro. The advantage of this is that it allows you to view your emails as previews so that you can delete anything suspicious before uploading them. You can also universally identify emails from various sources as spam. If you follow the advice to open many email accounts for various purposes, this is a good way to deal with them as a group.